
Benson Germanium Boost Pedal Blue
From Benson:When designing the temperature controlled fuzz, we tried some weird approaches. One of the things we tried was utilizing a voltage controlled error correcting circuit to bias a single germanium transistor. It ultimately didn’t work for the fuzz, since that circuit is comically sensitive to transistor gain attributes. We did find a place for it though.It turns out it was PERFECT for achieving a germanium clean boost that, (like our fuzz) is impervious to component drift, leakage, and temperature....moreso in fact. We also fixed a couple other issues preventing the germanium transistor from being used as a convincing linear boost...we increased the input headroom (even a normal guitar signal will drive a germanium transistor into unwanted input distortion without some tweaks) and increased the input impedance (a BJT transistor would normally thin out bass frequencies and interact neg- atively with whatever flows into it).The result is a germanium clean boost where you can uti